Floozy Speak!

Well what's happening?  Let's see.  I've been dabbling with FRAPS lately, creating some interesting videos using World of Warcraft as source material.  FRAPS works amazingly well expect for the fact the captured file sizes are ENORMOUS, i'm talkin like massive.  It'd be nice it they didnt do that.  But ahh well. 

In other news work goes and goes.  This week I'm grinding out a serious video for a medical firm on the next gen product.  So I'm watching a ton of proceedures in far away and distant places, I've seen surgery rooms in France that are sooooo white, i mean super white.  Kinda interesting really.  I wish the team on this project captured more of the general surroundings, I always crave interesting bROLL footage, ya know gimme some streets, buildings, some context to where we are, better yet, lets do a steadicam shot into the building, oooo that'd be nice. 

In the land of books, I'm still trying to finish 5 Patterns of Extrodinary Careers, which is a really good read btw.  This week while doing the capture phase of the video, i typically have time to do something else at the same time, so I plan to multitask and digitize footage for this video im working on and read the latest Real Simple, Dwell, and start checkin out Tom Peters Re-Imagine book which is a total trip to flip thru.  Its a cool book of biz ideas and inspiration, and excessive use of clip art and bad layout rule breaking.. like i hate tiny white text over funky backgrounds, makes it hard to read.  I think he planned it that way. 

In other other news... Mary and I are doing well.  We're about oh six/seven months into our relatioship here and it all kind suprises me in some ways.  I didnt expect it to be this way really, i had strange ideals pressed into my head from every "long lost love" or whatever flick i've seen since highschool.  I like btw, I like it alot.  Mary is awesome, beautiful, funny, instantanous, creative, agressive, passionate, smart, shes really a trip at times.  Watching her do improv I can see her talent just pour out and she gets the audience factor well, she can connect in an instant with people on the stage, very cool to watch.  And she makes a delight devilish deviled eggs and a kickass cheese cake.  I'm very lucky to have her in my life right now.  There are days I catch myself rambling away about work and I think "oh shit.. i just bored her to tears over my crap about work.." but she listens, advises and urges me to move on to whats important. 

I missed SXSW and ETCON this year, but next year I won't!  At least these days we can get wikis with info on the two cons and all the bloggers help me get clued into what went down.  I do plan to attend another Trend Watching Seminar if I can this year.  But this time I'd drag another member of our team along so that they can see the light along with me.  I've also debated attending Global Shop and or Super Nova, two very different conferences but both are very appealing to me.  In GlobalShop I could test the waters and find a new partner for the Retrospective Enthnography Rig for Retail I created last year, and at Super Nova, well thats like another mini Emerging Technology type conference to me. 

And lastly state of the blogbites... I have ALOT! 

The Startup!

ExperimentalGameplay!

More gaming ramblin notes, good stuff.

Apparently while americans seem to work more hours than the average bear, we still suck.

The PDF's are starting to roll outa ETCON, here's one on Tangible Computing, I noticed its got a shot of the audiopad or some kind of cool dj flash interactive mixer, ive seen awhile back, very cool.  Notes of this presenation are here

Sketchup clone?  Looks interesting...

In the land of gaming Will Wright of Sim City & the Sims fame has introduced a new kind of game development called procedural content development, which is basically put the creation of the game into the hands of our audience and supposedly, now i havent read the whole thing, but near real time etc.  So different than say mod development, more like active participation.  Now long long ago back before Quake ever hit I thought Quake was going to do that actually, you could keep adding maps to the game and keep creating basically teleport stations to get to them.  In fact there is a quake like game called zcube or something that lets you modify the game map in real time while playing it, which is pretty damn spiffy. 

Near Field Communications, very cool stuff here, I need to get into some research on this gang!

At ETCON this year the theme is "remix" and one of the sub threads at the conference is, guess what, justication on why we ( me ) and those I work with should be at ETCON..

" User-centred development:
There is great benefit in sharing your development efforts and processes with your users. Therefore release early and often. Set up mechanisms for user feedback, bug reports and patch contribution. "

Actually just go read everything at Wonderland if you are interested in ETCON.  Especially this post regarding the opening statement.

Now I think this is awesome but its also like feeding yahoo your collective intel on trends of the planet, its like viral fun that just informs Yahoo waay to much, but i cant resist.  Ok lemme change that..just starting messing with it.. its damn fun!  LOL, i spent my 10k, initally at first i put waaaay too much into the ipod Shuffle, but wtf, lets see what it does.

Hmmm what do ya think?  Crazy? Lets hope so, being sane sucks! 

Ha! In the hr or so ive spent in writing this big ass blog entry, i'm up 2k already!

Ok I am loving this blog, Wonderland, theres some excellent insights on game design taken from the the GDC con, which while im no longer tied to the industry per say ( my skint with Ritual and the making of Sin while at ADV Films ), I'm still very curious about the gaming industry.  There's some tasty comments on there about how WoW is amazing that i'd love to post over into normal ( my local listserve of sorts with local friends ) but I must resist that cause of the fires it will produce.  :P 

Here's a taste from Alice in Wonderland's GDC's (Gaming Developers Con) blog notes:

"Wal-Mart drives development decisions now. When publishers minimise risk by kow-towing to the retailers, you have a serious problem. When every game has to either be a blockbuster or a student film, we got a real problem. For my end of the game business all of our efforts are going into reaching a mainstream audience who may well even not be interested in what we do! My first game cost me 273,000 dollars. My next one is BLAH millions. How many of you work on games that make money? 4 out of 5 games lose money, according to one pundit who may be lying, admittedly. Can we do any worse if we just trusted the creative folks entirely instead of the publishers? "

"Every creative person was owned by a studio. Cinemas were owned by studios. Content was limited. "

"One day your publisher will walk in and cut a game because the government says you can’t make X types of games. "

"How many of you are here because you’re after a paycheck? "

"Publishers are becoming increasingly risk averse. Today you cannot get an innovative title published unless your last name is Wright or Miyamoto. Who was at the Microsoft keynote? I don’t know about you but it made my flesh crawl. [laughter] The HD era? Bigger, louder? Big bucks to be made! Well not by you and me of course. Those budgets and teams ensure the death of innovation.

"How often DO they perform human sacrifices at Nintendo?? My friends, we are FUCKED [laughter]. We are well and truly fucked. The bar in terms of graphics and glitz has been raised and raised until we can’t afford to do anything at all. 80 hour weeks until our jobs are all outsourced to Asia. but it’s ok because the HD era is here right? I say, enough. The time has come for revolution! It may seem to you that what I describe is inevitable forces of history, but no, we have free will! EA could have chosen to focus on innovation, but they did not. Nintendo could make development kits cheaply available to small firms, but they prefer to rely on the creativity on one aging designer. You have choices too: work in a massive sweatshop publisher-run studio with thousands of others making the next racing game with the same gameplay as Pole Position. Or you can riot in the streets of redwood city! Choose another business model, development path, and you can choose to remember why you love games and make sure in a generation’s time there are still games to love. You can start today."

"Did you ever notice there’s not place for the earth on the bottom line? We cancelled the Voyager mission for less than the cost of a video game! The dream of space appropriated by George W Bush? How can we stand for this?"

"We model male ethos in the games we design: soldier, super athlete, criminal. Anyone who was born with internet and computers are prosocial. Skaters are mainstream. We have two models of alpha maleness: skaters and ballers"

" I’m going to rant about How Sony And Microsoft Are About To Screw Your Game Design"

"NOW is your time to make something innovative or wacky. When you’re working on a student project, use your opportunity to do some crazy stuff "

"I’m pro-piracy. I want people to play the games I make. I do it because it’s art. I think DRM is a total fucking stupid mess. If the game industry collapses and can be reborn, I’m all for it. Pirate on!"

"Once WoW launched, WoW shot by everything. They have 600-800,000 paying subscribers in the US. EQ and co start at around 300K paying subs. What’s happened in the market shift from previous MMOs to today, is all existing MMOs went down in population when WoW came out. ALL of them. What does this mean?"

"The Sims sold 42m units. Half Life sold maybe 4m. WoW – comparitively speaking, a mere 800K. But WoW will generate more revenue in its lifetime than the others "

"MMOs generally last 5+ years. They have ancillary revenue. One of the things we’ll analyse is what makes (in terms of game design) MMOs up today. CoH (City of Heroes) taught us that games that aren’t deep and don’t have huge structure can be fun! CoH was a huge wakeup call for us all. "

"Immersion. Wow is AMAZING. It’s seamless and beautiful. Everything looks like it blends together." - side note, this is my #1 point i've been trying to convey to my "normal" kidz as of late. 

 "The Glue:
CoH had 250K and now it’s down to 125K. People on average played for 6 months and had done all the content. It didn’t have what I call the glue. You gotta think about the glue. "

mobile folks got in on the action as well

"Brands drive growth. You can create applications based on a publisher’s brand (e.g. NBA, NFL, etc, rights already reside with publishers there). We can do like half a dozen applications based on basketball in a season, for instance. Brands are important to us because the wireless users are the mass market. Half the users are female. It’s got to both young and old. Half these people already play games. They want to have the same experience interface with their favourite brands over the wireless network, like they already do with TV, film, etc.
Know your mass market mobile consumer:

• Tweener and preschool: the mobile pacifier. Give mom or dad’s phone to the kid to pass time.
• Teen: It’s a rite of passage. Time for experimentation. Getting your first mobile phone is a rite of passage in itself .. personalisation, customisation, reflecting you as an individual. It’s about Experiences.
• Young Adult: power users spending parental income. o Twenties: know gaming and want to continue gaming.
• Thirtysomethings: the loosely supervised executive with company phone.
• 40+: the grey gamer. Wants to be young, isn’t. Loves tech. "

Ok thats it, absorb, retain, and something.. crap i need to edit man!